Zerby Ancestors

Ninth Generation

256. Johann Martin ZERBE, son of Martin ZERBE and Anna Elizabetha , was born in Kettenbach, Nassau, Hessen (Germany) and died about 1739 in Jefferson Twp., Berks, PA.

Johann Martin Zerbe (1671), referred to in America only as Martin, was a native of Kettenbach where he was born in 1671. He was confirmed a Lutheran at Kettenbach in 1782 and is shown on the communicant roles there in 1686, 1687, 1690, 1692 and 1693. When he married in 1697 at Kettenbach, his bride Anna Elizabetha Jungel was described as the daughter of the "late Johannes Jungel from the oil mill." Because of continual wars and famine in the Palatinate, Martin apparently decided to go to England. Floating down the Rhine River to either Rotterdam or Amsterdam, Johan Martin Zerber with his wife and four children sailed from Holland for England on 21 June 1709. Shortly thereafter Martin Zerbst, Lutheran, husbandman and vinedresser, age 34, appeared with his family on a list of Palatine refugees at St. Catherine's and Deftford, London. The list was dated 11 to 15 June 1709, but presumably he was added to the list sometime later. His family on the 1709 list included four sons aged 11, 8, 4 and 2 years (i.e. respectively Johan Jacob, George Peter, Johann Japhet and Johann Philipp).

In June or July 1710 Martin migrated with his family to the province of New York as part of the Palatine expedition financed by the British Crown for the purpose of developing naval stores. It is presumed that Martin's brother Johan Philip came to America on the same ship. Martin settled in Columbia Co., New York, at East Camp, also known as Annsburg and Wormsdorff. From 1710 to 1712 Martin appeared on Gov. Hunter's subsistence list, during which time he drew a total of £91 in food and supplies. Martin and his brother Philip, both of Annsburg, volunteered in Captain Hartman Winedecker's Company in 1711 in an expedition against the French in Canada as part of Queen Anne's War. Martin was naturalized a British subject at the town hall at Albany, New York, on 17 January 1715/16. It appears that Martin remained in Columbia Co., NY on or near the Livingston Manor, not migrating to the Schoharie Valley as did many of his neighbors, until he migrated to the Tulpehocken region of northwestern Berks Co., PA in 1723.

Martin Zerbe arrived on Tulpehaca Creek in the spring of 1723. And in 1724 he was one of 15 signers who petitioned the Pennsylvania authorities for titles to the land on which they had settled. Martin signed as Toritine Serbo. Martin Sherva appeared on the Tulpehocken tax rates of 10-11 January 1726 and 2-4 January 1727. In September 1727 Martin Zerbe signed a petition for a road to be constructed from the Quaker meetinghouse in Oley to the Tulpehocken Church (i.e. Zion's or Rieth's Church), which petiotion was delivered to the Phildelphia Court of Quarter Sessions.

When Fell's Manor was surveyed in 1727, Martin Sharva's Run was mentioned as part of the northeast corner boundary. Martin Zerbe's tract was located in the northeast corner of Fell's Manor, and Martin Sharva's Run, now called Mill Creek, ran through the tract. It is this original survey of 153 acres joining Abraham Lauck on the southwest and John Page's manor line on the east that Caspar Wistar sold to Peter Zerby on 5 May 1742 for £61, being the tract on which Martin had lived prior to his death. Martin was still alive in 1737, when he was a baptismal witness for a grandson. Since his death is generally set in 1739, he had apparently waived his interests in the tract before his death to his son George Peter Zerbe. Presumably his widow continued to live with her son Peter until her death in 1750.